Brantley, Peter. 2008. Roles and expectations for digital libraries. EDUCAUSE review March/April.
I’m always interested in reading prognostications of any sort — they’re rarely even close to correct, but they’re often not all wrong, either. Of course, there’s no way of knowing which points fall into which category unless you’re lucky enough to be reading after the fact. Even with this, however, I think it’s important to really think about the future and the many and varried possibilities.
Brantley largely refrains from getting too specific, which is often the downfall of fortune tellers. Instead, he sticks to broader concepts, such as the importance of supporting learners, being immersive, redefining scholarly communication, speaking up for the rights of information users, and making collections easily discoverable.
This last point is, to me, the crux of the matter, especially this:
[Librarians] must work to make their collections easily discovered by people — not just by sophisticated librarians. The must be able to open up access to their collections through many different doors.
In other words, as expert searchers we shouldn’t have such a hard time making our collections easily searchable. And yet, how often are our own catalogs difficult, clunky, obtuse, and unfriendly? How often do our digital collections come up on the first page of general web searches? If we can’t get this stuff to work in today’s information environment, how on earth are we going to convince people that what we do is relevant or needed?
(On a related note, I also want to point y’all to this post on searching.)
